The American Civil Liberties Union has revealed that the FBI no longer feels the need for judicial or operator oversight when deploying base station-faking technology to detect mobile phones.
This capability is nothing new, but previously it was assumed that a warrant was needed before the FBI started tracking phones and that …

If every there was a reason to buy a 3G phone

Judges are terrorists

If we didn't allow this, then it would be like giving a government license to the terrorists. There are some risks I am not prepared to take, and when it comes to the safety of voters, I will not leave that up to judges to decide what is and what isn't legal. You're either with us or against us. Vote Emperor Bush!

(snip)

Aren't we past this yet? The man was an idiot, yes we have 2 months still to go, but surely we're well past this by now.

If the cell cos had spine..

If the cell cos had a spine (which they don't) they could stop this dead in it's tracks. Catch one of these fake sites deployed, file complaints with the FCC and get them to fine the DOJ's ass. The cellular companies spent $billions on this spectrum, they can't have some rogue (which the DOJ is in doing this without a warrant) start placing unauthorized cell sites into their spectrum.

Timely reminder

One More Reason

To ditch the damn thing and revert to land line such as I had for the first 55 years of my life. He who cannot survive without a cell phone all the time may just deserve his fate. Whatever that might be.

Cut Off the Phone

Stories about increasing state & commercial surveillance seem to be snowballing (or am I just looking harder?). I am certainly switching on my mobile less or leaving it at home. If the UK government implement a mobile phone registry I'll probably ditch it altogether. I'm lucky I live & work in a rural area so I tend not to get captured on CCTV or ANPR. I have little faith in governments to stop the rush towards Big Brother; I suspect Obama will listen to his security advisers telling him that more, not less, eavesdropping is needed to keep their jobs, air conditioned offices, stretch limos... oops I meant to keep say America safe. Plus Obama would be derided as a wishy-washy liberal if he gave one iota. I doubt public protests will have much effect. In the end it's just keep your head down (if that's not regarded as suspicious behaviour).

Cell Phones

Consider the 'all-eggs-in-one-basket" dilemma. There're docs on the web regarding US gov. (& European) systems in-place to allow completely shut-downs of cellular systems 'in the event of potential terrorism'. No doubt the result of phones being used to detonate bombs. Wired phones provide a bit of backup if you're concerned about keeping in contact in a time of need.

As to tracking via cell signature, even the most primitive evil-doers are aware of ESN scanning, GPS, data-mining etc, and are likely to use this tracking system to disseminate false info.

Another item is that there have been several instances of lost/injured people being found by cell-signal triangulation.

Depressing....

Corrected ACLU statement

An earlier version of the ACLU’s blog post on this subject misstated the legal authority on which the government relies to track the location of cell phones. The link above leads to the amended post, which explains that the documents uncovered by the FOIA deal with cell phone tracking in the criminal (not FISA) context.

Duh...

I'm having great difficulty getting my head around this. If I understand correctly they have to put a fake base station somehwere in the hope that a terrorist with a known phone number passes by so that they can track him/her presumably when he/she is in range of the fake base station.

And you trust the people who thought this up with the security of your country?

Fake basestation - real user

Erm, colour me stuipid, but presumably the fake basestation isn't connected to anything i.e you can't actually make a call? In which case, sooner or later, someone will need to make a 911 call but won't get through because the FBI are trying to trap some terrorist/drug dealer/government critic who may or may not live across the street.

Contract is almost up

Time to move to someone with a large 3G network in my area and pop for a new phone. What gets me is I know this stuff has been happening to an extent for quite a while, but the government is getting more and more bold and open with it. Will the new administration fix that? I certainly hope so. But until I see them actually take steps to roll back police state were marching toward I'll continue to do everything in my power to protect myself against them.

Not posting anon cos my view is let the fuckers read it and know who I am, after all with my views I'm probably already in multiple government databases already.

Re: Fake basestation - real user

I'd bet the basestation is actually hooked up to the telco network, as Terry Wrist would be suspicious if he found out that his cellphone isn't going through, even with 5-bar signals.

But then, the base station wouldn't register the calls to the original carrier, so it might just be that calls made from this thingy would be *free*. Well, free in the $$$; as the FBI would be listening everything. Oh well...